I'm a technology, privacy, and information security reporter and most recently the author of the book This Machine Kills Secrets, a chronicle of the history and future of information leaks, from the Pentagon Papers to WikiLeaks and beyond.
I've covered the hacker beat for Forbes since 2007, with frequent detours into digital miscellania like switches, servers, supercomputers, search, e-books, online censorship, robots, and China. My favorite stories are the ones where non-fiction resembles science fiction. My favorite sources usually have the word "research" in their titles.
Since I joined Forbes, this job has taken me from an autonomous car race in the California desert all the way to Beijing, where I wrote the first English-language cover story on the Chinese search billionaire Robin Li for Forbes Asia. Black hats, white hats, cyborgs, cyberspies, idiot savants and even CEOs are welcome to email me at agreenberg (at) forbes.com. My PGP public key can be found here.

An Excerpt From 'This Machine Kills Secrets': The Education Of Julian Assange

The following is an excerpt from This Machine Kills Secrets, my new book on the history and future of anonymous information leaks. In this passage I introduce Julian Assange, the man who revolutionized the act of leaking information, at a less visible moment in his life: Between his career as a fugitive hacker and his rise as a world-shaking, controversial political figure, when his ideas for a project called WikiLeaks were just beginning to take form.

The forty-first issue of the Melbourne University Mathematics and Statistics Society’s quarterly magazine, Paradox, contains a short but telling anecdote about the society’s most well-known former vice president.

One day during his three-year career as an undergraduate student of math and physics, Julian Assange was walking through Melbourne University’s campus when he spotted a mysterious valve protruding from the University Chemistry Building’s brick wall. He decided, spontaneously, to open it. When he did, the metal sphincter let out a deafening noise and a cloud of smoke. And for a few delightfully chaotic moments, as Assange told a fellow student later that day, the man who would advance the evolution of leaking more than anyone in the twenty-first century “was in heaven.”

A lanky, six-foot-two-inch, very pale, white-haired thirty-two-year-old, Assange cut a strange figure among the tanned teens and twentysomethings at the University of Melbourne. He was known to work at his computer for days on end with no sleep and little food. He spent much of his time camped out in the university’s Mathematics Society meeting room, usually wearing a dark gray trench coat over a T-shirt and his corn-silk hair in a ponytail. Sometimes he would stand up from his computer and perform a set of twenty or so jumping jacks, explaining to anyone present that short bouts of physical activity served a certain neurobiological function that made stimulant drugs unnecessary.

He spoke rarely about his past, and few asked. He was often accompanied by an entourage of strangers whom he declined to introduce to anyone in the room. And he mysteriously refused to let the Society put his photo on its website, citing “security” reasons and insisting that it be replaced with an image of an alien.

Assange no doubt felt like an extraterrestrial among the university’s more traditional students. He described the academic physicists at one conference as “snivelling fearful conformists of woefully, woefully inferior character” and wrote that “for every Feynman or Lorentz, [there are] 100 pen-pushing wretches scratching each other’s eyes out in academic committees or building better bombs for the DSTO (Defence Science & Technology Organisation), who had provided everyone with a bag, embossed with their logo, which most physicists pathetically lugged about with pride and ignorance.”

At the time, as Assange later recounted to The Age, the Applied Maths program at the university had received funding from the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (known as DARPA). Assange believed (inaccurately, according to the department’s staff) that money would ultimately go toward improving the design of the Grizzly Plow, a military bulldozer used in the first Iraq War and designed to sweep away barbed wire and sand at more than thirty-five miles per hour. The plow, as Assange described it, filled the trenches inhabited by enemy troops, rolling over them and burying them alive like an accelerated version of Tim May’s father’s bunker-burying bulldozer from World War II.

Assange was disgusted by what he saw as the military’s influence on campus and bored by formal education. If his classmates had asked about his past, they would have realized how little he had in common with them: In his three decades, he had already gone toe-to-toe with major corporations and the Pentagon as one of the world’s top pseudonymous hackers, been convicted of digital felonies, wandered Australia as a homeless vagrant, traveled to dozens of countries, run a business on the early Internet, co-written a memoir, devised an innovative crypto system, and, perhaps most significantly, received an education as valuable as any degree: nearly a decade of close reading, writing, and debate on the Cypherpunks Mailing List.

So, perhaps chiefly to entertain himself during his time in college, Assange invented a game: The Puzzle Hunt. Following a model invented by MIT for its venerable Mystery Hunt, the Puzzle Hunt was an elaborate campus-wide scavenger hunt punctuated with dozens of math and logic problems that drew in hundreds of students and still takes place annually on the University of Melbourne’s campus.

One of the puzzles Assange generated for that competition—and he created more of them in his first year than any other student—involved a long quote from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, with each letter written backward. Seemingly random gaps appeared throughout the chunk of text, and collecting the letters following those anomalies revealed a clue for the next puzzle. Another conundrum involved factoring large numbers into primes—a procedure that would have seemed natural for anyone familiar with RSA’s public key encryption tricks.

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